Princeton key to knowing Sotomayor

Princeton University, Michelle Obama wrote in her 1985 college thesis, was "infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League universities."

But for the second time in the Obama era, the stodgy Ivy League academy has emerged as a key to understanding the identity of a central player on the national stage — this time, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, who graduated from Princeton nine years earlier.

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The first lady weathered intense storms during the campaign, many of which focused, directly or indirectly, on her race, before settling into a traditional and popular public role in the White House. The Sotomayor nomination is dragging both the judge and the Obama White House — largely against their will — back onto that charged terrain.

Foes of Michelle Obama (Princeton '85) sought to tie her most pointed recent comment on race — that her husband's campaign made her proud of her country "for the first time" — back to that Princeton thesis, where Obama's sense of aching racial exclusion came through powerfully.

For Sotomayor (Princeton '76), the words in question came from 2001, a single sentence on the final page of a speech that has emerged as an issue in her nomination: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life," she said.

Friends, classmates, and Judge Sotomayor herself say that sense of racial identity as a central political category — and of her own place on the stage as not just a wise judge, but as a wise Latina — were formed in the unlikely crucible of Princeton.

It's where she was the moderate leader of a Puerto Rican activist group and where she graduated with the school's highest award, the M. Taylor Pyne Honor Prize, based in part on her activism. One friend from the time, Joe Schubert, dismissed the notion of Sotomayor as a student radical as "laughable."

"She had too much to lose to be the type of person who was out bombing ROTC buildings — and that happened at Princeton," Schubert said. "'Sonia' and 'radical' don't fit in the same sentence."

Sotomayor was among the first women at Princeton, and the first beneficiaries of a minority recruiting drive that would take in many of the other Ivy Leaguers now at top levels of the American government, and her story has riveted other members of that cadre.

"I was struck by how similar her story is to the president's and first lady's," said Crystal Nix Hines, a classmate of Michelle Obama who was the first black editor of Princeton's student newspaper and is now a lawyer and writer in Los Angeles. "Like Judge Sotomayor, Michelle Obama had to find her comfort zone in a community of extraordinarily intelligent and privileged individuals at Princeton, most of whom had little knowledge of the circumstances from which she had risen."

Though Obama and Sotomayor never crossed paths at Princeton, elements of their experience are almost eerily parallel.

The school was "an alien land for me," Sotomayor recalled two decades later, describing how Puerto Rican activism and the hub of minority politics, The Third World Center, "provided me with an anchor I needed to ground myself in that new and different world."

Later, Michelle Obama also came to the Third World Center, eventually serving on its governing board. In her thesis, the future first lady described a similar alienation.